BOSS project

The Boss project aims at providing an efficient wireless interconnection between land and on-board communication for public transport and to offer a new set of services for security and safety for such systems. Railway transport will be used to demonstrate the Boss concepts. In fact, security issues, traditionally covered in stations by means of video-surveillance are clearly lacking on-board, due to the absence of efficient transmission means from the train to a supervising control centre. Similarly, safety issues are generally handled when the train arrives in stations or during maintenance stops, which prevents proactive actions to be carried out. Using the additional bandwidth or an other wireless communication system, high speed internet access will be proposed to the travelers. Boss is willing to offer the mobile train the possibility to inform a control centre both on security and safety issues, and consequently to greatly increase the user protection as well as offering internet access to the travelers.

To reach the goal of Boss project, it is proposed to develop a scheme that offers interconnectivity with a guaranteed QoS level both inside the carriages and between the train and the surveillance centre. This implies to establish internal (wired and wireless, e.g. WLAN) and external (wireless, e.g. 802.16(2004, e) and UMTS) train data links, allowing a bi-directional connection with a control centre able to manage alerts and video-surveillance activities, as well as possibly a connection inside the train with mobile supervisors (e.g. controllers). The internet access for the users requires lower QoS but higher throughputs and is thus foreseen to be delivered with a high throughput wireless access that could be the same as the security access with different QoS priorities. Moreover, the railways being deployed both in suburban areas and in the countryside, vertical handover issues are to be considered on the external wireless link, which adds a second complexity level to the interconnectivity and justifies that mobility over IP, QoS and handover issues are considered together by Boss project and not studied separately. By this Way Boss will contribute to the CELTIC “Integrated Telecommunications Systems”

A test-bed platform demonstrating in a real train this dual-mode approach with guaranteed QoS will be developed to validate Boss approach, and two Europeans well known end users will be involved in the project to evaluate concretely the different technical outputs off Boss. By this Way Boss will promote the CELTIC “Pan-European Lab”

The main idea is to provide a new set of services for personal security and safety while on board of public transport such as trains, by means of an efficient interconnection between land and on-board communication systems with a guaranteed level of QoS. Moreover, in order to validate the design but also integrate real requirements, use realistic specifications and be able to adapt simulations based on real life inputs, Boss will develop a test-bed implementing two different transmitting techniques (e.g. WLAN, WiMAX (802.16) and UMTS) and will demonstrate with it the wireless connection capability both for users and surveillance means inside the carriages and for the train to the surveillance centre. This technology platform will allow to show the feasibility of transports on-board surveillance, which is expected to increase the level of safety and security services for European citizens.

It should be noted that the reason why video applications are a key issue in the project is that the bandwidth they require is far from negligible, which will have a deep impact on the choice of wireless accesses and design of end-to-end QoS solutions, but also handover capabilities.